I have an external hard drive that I put Mandriva on, I went through the whole process which took about 2 1/2 hrs, I went to reboot & it looked at the hard drive for a second and then opened Windows. I checked disk management under computer management & it showed my partitions and the size of each, but on all 3, the percentage free was 100%. The capacity and free space were the same number of MB. Why didn't it write onto my hard drive? What was it doing for 2 1/2hrs? Could the CD's have been bad?
At the very end I do remember it asking to put in CD 67a, and when I did, it looked at the cd and then asked me to put in CD 67a. I tried each CD & then tried 67a again. I said the same thing, so I pressed the previous button and it said that it was done & had an option for me to reboot.
How do I fix this problem?

If it allowed you to boot to windows, without showing the Lilo or Grub bootloader then you didnt install the bootloader to the MBR (the main hard disk boot sector) and windows will be the only OS to boot (managed by windows).

Windows will not be able to understand the ext2 or ext3 filesystem so Computer management will not show the usage statistics for these drives ... partition magic will or the ext2fs filesystem reader for windows.

you will probably have to re-install, but try to upgrade instead of a clean install and just tell it to put the bootloader in the MBR of hda1, which will be the main disk in the computer with windows on it (common arrangement)

Thanks for the reply! I'll have to give that a try tomorrow.
I remember I had to choose were to put the bootloader. I had no idea what to do, so I asked it to put it on my external hard drive - sda. My mistake.

As has been said, the partitions only look empty to Windows, because it doesn't understand them.

As for the thing about repeatedly asking for the first CD at the end. That happened to me on my test setup so I pressed the previous button and it rebooted perfectly. I'm sure this has nothing to do with your problem.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

What you can do is boot Mandrake from your first Install Disk and use it to rescue your system, or boot from Knoppix or some other live Distro, open a shell and su:
mkdir /mnt/mdk
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda? /mnt/mdk (? replaces disk number)
chroot /mnt/mdk /bin/bash
At the prompt start grub:
>>grub
grub> root (hd?,?) (specify where your /boot partition is(will be same as install partition,unless seperate /boot created))
grub> setup (hd0) (installs Grub to your MBR)
grub> quit (quits the Grub shell)
You should now Ctrl + D to exit chrooted enviroment
umount /mnt/mdk
Ctrl + D twice to exit shell

You don't need to do all that. In fact, I'm not sure it will work as Mandriva uses LILO, not GRUB.

Boot from the CD, press F1 at the splash screen and type "rescue" at the boot prompt. This will mount your existing partitions and present you with a rescue menu, one item of which is to (re)install the bootloader.

However I ran into another problem.... I rebooted and a menu option came up
linux
linux-nonfb
failsafe
windows

(BTW: above the menu option it says GNU GRUB version 0.95)

Tried linux.... It went to the start screen, you know with the huge tux w/star eyes, or something like that, and it just sat there forever.
Turned off the computer & tried the linux-nonfb option
I got some weird error messages-here's the end text of it:

I have another problem. I can't start windows without my external hard drive, because if I do it says GRUB and sits there forever. I can't lug around my external hard drive wherever I go. I have to get to Windows without it. Right now I can't. Please help me fix this too.

I suggest a quick re-write of the Master Boot Record as I posted elsewhere on this forum.

Basically boot from a Windows floppy and A:\>fdisk /mbr

This will replace the Linux Master Boot Record with Windows. You'll have to re-install/repair the MBR from your distro boot CD/DVD and this time choose to put GRUB on the master boot record as per nelz's instructions above.

I wouldn't put GRUB on the MBR of the fixed disc, this is probably what is causing the problem. Leave the windows bootloader there, put GRUB on the MBR of the removable drive and add an entry to the Windows bootloader menu to call it. That way, you'll only try to access the removable drive when you want to.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

I don't have a windows CD, it never came with my computer, but I did find Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 1 Utility: Setup Disks for Floppy Boot Install online. It looks like that will be the same thing, but I'm not positive. It's about 4.3MB.

I understand that I have to put the bootloader on my external harddrive, but should I put it under /dev/sda or dev/sda1 (which is my first partion-the root directory)? I put it under sda1 the first time, before I changed it to hda. What entry do I add to Windows bootloader (that's the boot.ini file right?). I looked at the file & couldn't figure out what to add. I checked online briefly, but didn't find anything.